You've Never Heard Of—Or Seen—This Carbon Fiber Supercar

They slap you back in your seat with race-car performance. Their accelerator pedals are like short-throw rheostats that take you from zip to full power with light pressure from your foot. You can smoke the tires and start gobbling up road or you can idle through traffic and draw admiring looks. They make many grown men grin like little boys, while little boys gape with wonder. Women tend to love them or dismiss them. No one treats them mildly.

They are not called supercars for nothing.

There are many ways to make a su­percar truly super— beautiful body­ work, an impeccable pedigree—but at the heart of it all is blinding perform­ance. Lots of horsepower and little weight. Each of a Viper's 400 horsepower has to propel 8.2 lb. of automo­bile, while the new Testarossa's carry 8.5 each. The Lamborghini Diablo's curb weight translates into 7.3 lb. per horsepower, an F40 checks in with 6.2, while a historic favorite, the 427 Cobra, has only 5.9 lb. per horsepower.

Torque and gearing are all part of the formula too, but the secret is a lot of horsepower lightly burdened. And now comes a contender built in the princi­pality of Monaco. What we have at this point is still under development, but if all goes as promised, this mid-engine machine will have a horsepower-to-weight ratio that means each horse is carrying only 3.0 lb. Weighing in at 2200 lb., it's said to have 720 bhp.

John Lamm

Sounds downright delicious, so we went to Monte Carlo to drive it. At least that was the plan. In the rarefied world of exotic cars, so many things are pos­sible. . . and a few are not. But back to this shortly.

What you see here isn't so much a new car as a name change. Remember the Centenaire? Introduced at the 1990 Monaco Grand Prix—its home race—the car was the newest of the mid-engine supercar class. The brain­ child of sometime IMSA and CART driver Fulvio Ballabio, the Centenaire mixed modern race-car technology with exotic horsepower. . . and a projected $500,000 price tag. After further devel­opment, the car has gone through a bit of a metamorphosis and reemerged with slightly revised styling and a new name: Monte Carlo GTB. No doubt Chevrolet will require still more change in the name department, as this division just announced it will be using the Monte Carlo name again soon, but for the moment the moniker sticks. And, after all, it is the name of their city, which is more than Chevrolet can say.

What will make the Monte Carlo GTB unique when it goes into produc­tion next month will be its chassis. Although it has been used for parts of pro­duction automobiles, carbon fiber has appeared as the primary chassis materi­al only in race and show cars. (As has been pointed out, the XJR-9-based XJR-15 was all carbon fiber and came out in 1990 - Ed)

John Lamm

Remove the exterior bodywork of the Monte Carlo, and you'll find a black center monocoque. Molded, then baked in an autoclave by Pienfei in Ita­ly, the tub contains the passenger compartment and is the anchoring point for steel subframes that carry the front sus­pension, rear suspension and drive-train. Strong as the carbon fiber may be, it is reinforced at the subframe mount­ing points by thick aluminum plates.

The tub is fairly tall in back, extending up to the back of the occupants' heads, while a steel rollcage extends upward from there, curving forward along the roofs outer edges, downward to form the car's A-pillars, and attaching again at the front of the monocoque. A fuel cell is fitted inside the back wall of the tub.

Suspension front and rear is the sort you'd expect to see on an IMSA race car, upper and lower A-arms with Koni adjustable racing shocks, beefy coil springs and anti-roll bars. The brakes have cross-drilled, vented discs fitted with Brembo calipers. Pirelli P Zero tires, 245/35-18 front, 335/30-18 rear, are mounted on O.Z. wheels done to Monte Carlo's design. Nothing unusu­al for an exotic car, and only appropriate for exotic levels of horsepower.

John Lamm

One of the prime reasons for the name change was the decision to use a new engine. The Centenaire was powered by Lamborghini's 492-bhp V12, but that powerplant was aban­doned in favor of one created by my old friend, engineer Carlo Chiti. Designer of the Ferrari in which I won my world championship, Chiti left Maranello to do the ATS Grand Prix car before be­ginning a long relationship with Alfa Romeo's Autodelta racing team. His most recent racing design was the Motori Moderni Formula 1 engine.

An interim proposal for Monte Carlo power was an English-designed 7.0-liter V12. Abandoned when the com­pany that designed it went bust, it was replaced with Chiti's 4.0-liter twin-turbo, which will go into production.

All the state-of-the-art specifications are there, with aluminum block and heads, four valves per cylinder, a Magneti Marelli engine-management sys­tem and a Garrett turbo for each bank of the V12. The compression ratio is 8.0:1, the turbochargers pump around 15 psi, and horsepower comes to a projected 720. Incidentally, in making the swap from the Lamborghini to Chiti's V12, the car lost 300 lb., as the new V12's weight complete with accessories is 396 lb.

With the Chiti V12 and its con­ventional rear gearbox, the center tun­nel is quite a bit smaller.

Around all this is a carbon fiber body credited to Castagna. Classic car fans know this name as that of a respected carrozzeria of the Thirties. Ballabio's grandfather worked for the firm, so the grandson arranged use of the name and added it to his exotic creation.

John Lamm

Exterior design is a matter of person­al opinion, of course, but I think this is the weakest point of the Monte Carlo. Granted, the car has to stand up against the showcase designs from the world's best—Pininfarina, Gandini, Giugiaro — but it does lack the sleekness of these exotics. On the other hand, there is a definite aggressiveness, almost a pugnacious air to the Monte Carlo GTB that makes it obvious this isn't some wimpy pretender.

Like many mid-engine exotic cars, the Monte Carlo is a bit difficult to get into, but once there, it has what you'd expect. . . supportive, leather-uphol­stered seats; full instrumentation; and the sense you are in an IMSA GTP ma­chine done up for a fashion show. The expected gauges are there, with black numerals on a white background, set in a carbon fiber panel, which makes a nice contrast to the leather.

At this point, I should be offering driving impressions of this exciting new car, but I'm afraid all I can pass on are rolling impressions. But even here there are more than a few out-of-the-ordinary overtones.

John Lamm

John Lamm and I were there as scheduled, mid-morning at the compa­ny's two-story headquarters in the Fontvielle section of Monte Carlo, just down the hill from the Grimaldi Palace. The car was due any minute by flatbed from Modena, where engine-management fine-tuning had been underway. Carlo Chiti would be along later after our static photography to accompany me in a blast across the Grande Corniche.

An anxious time passed— but no car. Then Chiti arrived and asked, "So what have you done with the car?"

"It has yet to arrive, Carlo." " Impossible." Something terrible must have hap­pened. The driver must have had an accident. He is probably lying dead by the side of the autostrada. Orribile! Che malevolenza!

Actually, the driver's personal trage­dy was instead a family tragedy, or maybe just an extended customs delay at the Italian border. In any event, in time the truck showed up with its precious cargo intact. More or less.

John Lamm

Chiti attached his laptop computer to the engine-management system by umbilical cord, the V12 roared into life, and we can report that his V12 makes a wonderful and powerful noise. Was it now time for my drive?

Chiti punched a few more characters into his laptop; the engine stopped. Ecco! Was that not magnificent?

"Yes, Carlo, but can we go for that drive now?"

Well, no. The weather in Italy was terrible last week. . .

"So?"

Terrible weather at home forced all the Italian Formula 1 teams to Barcelo­na for their pre-season testing.

"So?"

John Lamm

The Marelli engineer scheduled to do the Monte Carlo's engine-management fine-tune programming got shipped out to Barcelona at the last minute. And, so, the engine won't run without that umbilical cord linked to Chiti's laptop.

I had a fleeting thought of blasting across the Grande Corniche, Carlo at my side frantically punching up engine-management codes. He is an old and trusted friend, but there are limits. On both sides.

So what can you learn from driving a car that's rolling down a hill? Certainly that its carbon fiber chassis feels as solid as any structure I've ever experi­enced, every bit the stable platform necessary for the Monte Carlo's race-derived suspension. Also, that even with a populace as cosmopolitan and blasé as the Monegasques, a car as exot­ic as the Monte Carlo GTB still commands quite a crowd—whether rolling or roaring along.

What's next for Monte Carlo Automobiles? With thousands of develop­ment miles on five Centenaires and a pair of Chiti V12-powered Monte Car­los, the customer version is scheduled to be ready for production in May. Plans call for five Monte Carlos to be finished in 1992, and 15 each year after that. Such parts as the tub and larger carbon fiber body pieces, along with the V12, are supplied from Italy, and the final assembly is carried out in Monte Carlo.

John Lamm

Confident of his car's success, Ballabio is readying another version of the Monte Carlo, a targa in which the removable center lid stows atop the engine cover. Chiti supplies the V12 power again, but this time from a 3.5-liter, non-turbo engine that promises around 400 bhp.

If you have a half-million set aside for such a toy as the GTB, you just might get the chance to spend it. Plans call for a U.S. edition, and Callaway Engineer­ ing of Corvette and Aston Martin fame—and of East Lyme, Connecti­cut—has been approached to do a feasi­bility study of certifying the carbon fiber supercar for America.

As for getting the Monte Carlo onto the road, into production and finally for sale in the United States, we'll keep you posted.

An earlier version of this article's headline referred to the Monte Carlo GTB as the first carbon fiber supercar, but it was in fact beaten by about a year by the Jaguar XJR-15. The headline has been updated accordingly.

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